Bedbug Control Petts Wood

Why Foggers and Shop Sprays Fall Short

Bedbugs spend most of their time packed into cracks: frame joints, screw holes, the seam of a mattress, the gap behind a skirting. A fogger fills the room with a mist that settles on open surfaces. Very little of it reaches the places they actually sit, and none of it reaches the eggs glued inside those places.

A spray can only kill what it touches. Most people spray what they can see, which is a fraction of what is there. The ones that survive carry on breeding.

What DIY Leaves Behind

The bigger problem is not that home products fail. It is what happens to the infestation while they do.

• A scattered problem. Irritating sprays and foggers drive bedbugs out of the bed and into walls, the next room, or the sofa. A problem that was in one bed can end up in three rooms.
• Residue on surfaces. A film of product on furniture and skirtings can make a professional chemical treatment less predictable.
• Lost time. Weeks of trying things is weeks of eggs hatching.
• Bedding moved around. Sleeping in another room to escape the bites often spreads them.

None of that is unusual, and none of it stops a proper treatment working. It just needs to be taken into account.

Before We Come: Stop, Keep the Cans, Tell Us

1. Stop spraying and fogging. Every application pushes them further out.
2. Keep the containers of anything you used, or photograph the labels, so we know what is on the surfaces.
3. Tell us which rooms you treated and when, and whether you moved beds or slept elsewhere.
4. Go back to sleeping in your own bed, so they come back to where the treatment will be.

What Changes About the Treatment

Because DIY spreads bedbugs, the room count is often larger than the first bedroom where they were found. An inspection before treatment is especially useful here; inspections start from £120.

Heat suits this situation well, because it does not rely on bedbugs touching a product. The room is raised to a temperature they cannot survive, eggs included, and the thermal camera finds the cold spots where they have retreated. Chemical treatment still works, over two or three visits, provided we know what is already on the surfaces. How professional chemical treatment works explains why it reaches what a shop spray does not.

If you have only ever seen one or two bugs and reached for a spray out of alarm, that is a slightly different situation, and the page on finding a single bedbug may be the better place to start. Otherwise, ring and tell us what you used; bedbug treatments start from £220, and the final figure comes on the phone before anything is booked.

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